A teacher of working-class and social history, and editor of the Canadian journal Labour/Le Travail, Palmer chronicles those who defied authority, choosing to live dangerously outside the defining cultural constraints of early insurgent--and later dominant--capitalism. They include peasants, religious heretics, witches, pirates, runaway slaves, prostitutes and pornographers, frequenters of taverns and fraternal society lodge rooms, revolutionaries, blues and jazz musicians, beats, and contemporary youth gangs. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Peasants, religious heretics, witches, pirates, runaway slaves, prostitutes and pornographers, frequenters of taverns and fraternal society lodge rooms, revolutionaries, blues and jazz musicians, beats, and contemporary youth gangs--those who defied authority, choosing to live outside the defining cultural dominions of early insurgent and, later, dominant capitalism are what Bryan D. Palmer calls people of the night. These lives of opposition, or otherness, were seen by the powerful as deviant, rejecting authority, and consequently threatening to the established order. Constructing a rich historical tapestry of example and experience spanning eight centuries, Palmer details lives of exclusion and challenge, as the "night travels" of the transgressors clash repeatedly with the powerful conventions of their times. Nights of liberation and exhilarating desire--sexual and social--are at the heart of this study. But so too are the dangers of darkness, as marginality is coerced into corners of pressured confinement, or the night is used as a cover for brutalizing terror, as was the case in Nazi Germany or the lynching of African Americans. Making extensive use of the interdisciplinary literature of marginality found in scholarly work in history, sociology, cultural studies, literature, anthropology, and politics, Palmer takes an unflinching look at the rise and transformation of capitalism as it was lived by the dispossessed and those stamped with the mark of otherness.
A Michael L. Printz Honor Book "This is East Texas, and there's lines. Lines you cross, lines you don't cross. That clear?" New London, Texas. 1937. Naomi Vargas and Wash Fuller know about the lines in East Texas as well as anyone. They know the signs that mark them. They know the people who enforce them. But sometimes the attraction between two people is so powerful it breaks through even the most entrenched color lines. And the consequences can be explosive. Ashley Hope Pérez takes the facts of the 1937 New London school explosion—the worst school disaster in American history—as a backdrop for a riveting novel about segregation, love, family, and the forces that destroy people. "[This] layered tale of color lines, love and struggle in an East Texas oil town is a pit-in-the-stomach family drama that goes down like it should, with pain and fascination, like a mix of sugary medicine and artisanal moonshine."—The New York Times Book Review "Pérez deftly weaves [an] unflinchingly intense narrative....A powerful, layered tale of forbidden love in times of unrelenting racism."―starred, Kirkus Reviews "This book presents a range of human nature, from kindness and love to acts of racial and sexual violence. The work resonates with fear, hope, love, and the importance of memory....Set against the backdrop of an actual historical event, Pérez...gives voice to many long-omitted facets of U.S. history."―starred, School Library Journal
This book examines the concept of darkness through a range of cultures, histories, practices and experiences. It engages with darkness beyond its binary positioning against light to advance a critical understanding of the ways in which darkness can be experienced, practised and conceptualised. Humans have fundamental relationships with light and dark that shape their regular social patterns and rhythms, enabling them to make sense of the world. This book ‘throws light’ on the neglect of these social patterns to emphasize how the diverse values, meanings and influences of darkness have been rarely considered. It also examines the history of our relationship with the dark and highlights how normative attitudes towards it have emerged, while also emphasising its cultural complexity by considering a contemporary range of alternative experiences and practices. Challenging notions of darkness as negative, as the antithesis of illumination and enlightenment, this book explores the rich potential of darkness to stimulate our senses and deepen our understandings of different spaces, cultural experiences and creative engagements. Offering a rich exploration of an emergent field of study across the social sciences and humanities, this book will be useful for academics and students of cultural and media studies, design, geography, history, sociology and theatre who seek to investigate the creative, cultural and social dimensions of darkness.
In the clinical microbiology laboratory, blood is a critical diagnostic sample that, in the majority of cases is sterile (or is it?). However, when microbes gain access to and multiply in the bloodstream, it can result in life-threatening illness including sepsis. Mortality rates from bloodstream infection and sepsis range from 25% to 80%, killing millions of people annually. Blood cultures are a vital technology used in the microbiology laboratory to isolate and identify microbes and predict their response to antimicrobial therapy. The Dark Art of Blood Cultures, edited by Wm. Michael Dunne, Jr., and Carey-Ann D. Burnham, surveys the entire field of blood culture technology, providing valuable information about every phase of the process, from drawing samples to culture methods to processing positive cultures. The Dark Art of Blood Cultures is organized around several major topics. History of blood culture methods. Details the timeline of blood culture methods from manual through automated and describes the technological development of the leading automated blood culture systems (Bactec, BacT/Alert, and VersaTREK). Manual and automated blood culture methods. Critiques manual and automated methods for setting up blood cultures for adult and pediatric patients. Detection of pathogens directly from blood specimens. Describes currently available CE marked and FDA-cleared commercial tests using both phenotypic and genotypic markers, including their strengths and limitations. The workflow of culturing blood. Includes best practices from specimen collection to culture system verification, processing positive cultures for microbe identification and antibiotic susceptibility determination, along with the epidemiology of positive blood cultures and the value of postmortem blood cultures. Microorganisms in the blood. Examines the concept of a blood microbiome in healthy and diseased individuals. The Dark Art of Blood Cultures is a resource that clinicians, laboratorians, lab directors, and hospital administrators will find engaging and extremely useful.
Western culture has long been fascinated by black women, but a history of enslavement and colonial conquest has variously labeled black women's bodies as "exotic" and "grotesque." In this remarkable cultural history of black female beauty, Janell Hobson explores the enduring figure of the "Hottentot Venus." In 1810, Saartjie Baartman was taken from South Africa to Europe, where she was put on display at circuses, salons, and museums and universities as the "Hottentot Venus." The subsequent legacy of representations of black women's sexuality-from Josephine Baker to Serena Williams to hip-hop and dancehall videos-continues to refer back to this persistent icon. This book analyzes the history of critical and artistic responses to this iconography by black women in contemporary photography, film, literature, music, and dance.
Darkness divides and enlivens opinion. Some are afraid of the dark, or at least prefer to avoid it, and there are many who dislike what it appears to stand for. Others are drawn to this strange domain, delighting in its uncertainties, lured by all the associations of folklore and legend, by the call of the mysterious and of the unknown. The history of our attitudes toward darkness—toward what we cannot quite make out, in all its physical and metaphorical manifestations—challenges the very notion of a world that we can fully comprehend. In this book, Nina Edwards explores darkness as both a physical feature and cultural image, through themes of sight, blindness, consciousness, dreams, fear of the dark, night blindness, and the in-between states of dusk or fog, twilight and dawn, those points or periods of obscuration and clarification. Taking us across the ages, from the dungeons of Gothic novels to the concrete bunkers of Nordic Noir TV shows, Edwards interrogates the full sweep of humanity’s attempts to harness and suppress the dark first through our ability to control fire and, later, illuminate the world with electricity. She explores how the idea of darkness pervades art, literature, religion, and our everyday language. Ultimately, Edwards reveals how darkness, whether a shifting concept or palpable physical presence, has fed our imaginations.
BETWEEN 1933 AND 1945 MEMBERS OF THREE GROUPS—THE Nazi fascists, Inner Emigration, and Exiles—fought with equal fervor over who could definitively claim to represent the authentically “great German culture,” as it was culture that imparted real value to both the state and the individual. But when authorities made pronouncements about “culture” were they really talking about high art? This book analyzes the highly complex interconnections among the cultural-political concepts of these various ideological groups and asks why the most artistically ambitious art forms were viewed as politically important by all cultured (or even semi-cultured) Germans in the period from 1933 to 1945, with their ownership the object of a bitter struggle between key figures in the Nazi fascist regime, representatives of Inner Emigration, and Germans driven out of the Third Reich.
A wide-ranging look at surrealist and postsurrealist engagements with the culture and imagery of childhood We all have memories of the object-world of childhood. For many of us, playthings and images from those days continue to resonate. Rereading a swathe of modern and contemporary artistic production through the lens of its engagement with childhood, this book blends in-depth art historical analysis with sustained theoretical exploration of topics such as surrealist temporality, toys, play, nostalgia, memory, and 20th-century constructions of the child. The result is an entirely new approach to the surrealist tradition via its engagement with "childish things." Providing what the author describes as a "long history of surrealism," this book plots a trajectory from surrealism itself to the art of the 1980s and 1990s, through to the present day. It addresses a range of figures from Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, Joseph Cornell, and Helen Levitt, at one end of the spectrum, to Louise Bourgeois, Eduardo Paolozzi, Claes Oldenburg, Susan Hiller, Martin Sharp, Helen Chadwick, Mike Kelley, and Jeff Koons, at the other.
"Often denounced as nihilistic and even degenerate, film noir seems an unlikely antidote to the despair of contemporary popular culture. But at the heart of these dark films is a spiritual quest that is profoundly hopeful. In a fascinating re-evaluation of "American noir," Thomas Hibbs argues that these powerful tales of sin and redemption embody religious themes that are essential for cultural renewal." "Starting with early noir classics such as Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, Hibbs reveals their surprising connection with contemporary quest films such as The Passion, The Sixth Sense, and Spider-Man. Despite its roots in the heyday of Hollywood Marxism, noir even displays a distinctly conservative bent - redemption is personal, not political, and scientific rationalism fails to deliver on its sunny promises." "Arts of Darkness explores not only the shadowy works of the 1940s and 1950s but also recent films in which the dark themes of noir converge with the quest for redemption. Hibbs dubs these diverse but related works "American noir," a term that encompasses Chinatown and Taxi Driver, The Matrix and The Terminator, American Beauty and Thelma and Louise. Hibbs insists that these tragic and gritty films stand among the most powerful religious narratives of our time."--BOOK JACKET.
